Architectural Posters as Works of Art

Although Judith York Newman is not as familiar a name as Max Protetch and Leo Castelli, fellow gallerists who held architectural shows in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, SPACED Gallery of Architecture, established in 1976, is notable as the first gallery in the city devoted to architecture. Unlike Protetch and Castelli, who were dealers of art with occasional shows of architecture, Newman was educated as an architect (at Cornell University) and worked as an architect as well as an educator and editor, all within the realm of architecture. Therefore SPACED, as the name implies, focused exclusively on representations of architecture, presenting prints, drawings, photographs, and models on architects and buildings over more than 40 years (the latest show was held in fall 2019).

While Designing Decades: Architectural Poster Art (1972-1982) is not limited to posters for shows that were held at SPACED, theirs are some of the first posters visitors encounter when stopping off the elevator on the fifth floor of the Rudolph Institute's Modulightor Building. Notable among them is Architectural America (at top), an early show in 1976 that was advertised with text literally cut and pasted atop an image of Jasper Johns' Three Flags (1958). Just as the literature for Designing Decades describes its contents as encapsulating “a pivotal moment in time before the internet age,” the collage of text on art in this poster — clearly visible in the original on display behind glass — captures the techniques of those pre-Photoshop days.

Other posters from SPACED on display include, among others, a few by illustrator David Macaulay, clearly a favorite of Newman's, and one from a 1977 exhibition of the drawings of Lebbeus Woods. Posters from other venues span from the Grand Palais and Centre Pompidou, both in Paris, and the RIBA Heinz Gallery in London, to the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) and Brooklyn Museum, both in New York City. The last venue staged Women in American Architecture, the influential exhibition organized by The Architectural League of New York in 1977. Its presence in Designing Decades comes in the form of the text-heavy “Historic Chart Relating Architectural Projects to General and Women's History in the United States,” revealing that, while many posters opted for striking graphics to hook people, some served as vehicles of disseminating information beyond the confines of their exhibitions.

Designing Decades is spread across the fifth and sixth floors of Modulightor, the building Paul Rudolph designed for the lighting company of the same name in the early 1990s. The fifth and sixth floors were added after Rudolph's death in 1997 but were based on extant designs by the famed architect. As such, a visit to the exhibition is recommended as much to see inside the Rudolph building as for seeing the posters on display. If anything, the posters hung across the two floors have a hard time competing with the architectural complexity of the spaces. Nevertheless, Newman and the Rudolph Institute did a good job of placing the posters in sometimes unexpected places — at stair landings, for instance — turning the posters also into invitations to explore Rudolph's interiors.